Had a GREAT time in Philadelphia this past weekend, where I attended DogCon4 and delivered an address to Neumann University on “The Uncanny Valley.” MANY THANKS to Neumann University for supporting my trip, Dr. Bill Hamilton for inviting/hosting/handling, Dave Bullis for running the media, and of course, all my friends at Raw Dog Screaming Press for integrating this lecture into their literary convention. It was great to meet everyone, and to see old friends throughout the weekend (from students I met during my last visit to speak at Neumann to buddies in gold morphsuits and Seton Hill alums).

If you missed this talk, my next one on the subject will take place at a PARSEC gathering in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Library (Squirrel Hill) on Dec 12th at 1:30pm. DETAILS.

I will be giving a talk about “The Uncanny Valley”, free and open to the public, at Neumann University (near Philadelphia, PA) on the early evening of Oct 23rd. This event doubles as an early bird festivity for Raw Dog Screaming Press’ exciting conference, DogCon4. [Raw Dog is the parent company for Guide Dog Books, who is slated to publish The Popular Uncanny later this Fall/Winter.]

This is a return of the uncanny to Neumann, where I gave an invited lecture on “The Popular Uncanny” back in 2012. To get the flavor, you can watch that lecture on youtube:

The latest print issue of Wired magazine (Sept 2015) includes a mini-feature story on “The New Cultural Literacy 2016,” which includes the above entry on the ubiquity of the uncanny valley in technological design. The phrase “Uncanny Valley” has indeed become so ubiquitous in discourse that it seems to be drummed up whenever anything is “creepy” or horrifying in gaming, robotics, automation and computer imaging. The concept of the “uncanny valley,” described briefly in the magazine by Clive Thompson, is that “when you make animated humans look too realistic, they suddenly seem creepy — like zombies.” He’s summarizing the well-known theory of Masahiro Mori, and though he frames it as something out of Hollywood (the most common example is the creepy representation of Tom Hanks’ character in The Polar Express) it is a concept that has its roots in android science. I have discussed the Uncanny Valley theory regularly on this blog.

This deceptively small recognition by Wired has all the feeling of a watershed moment to me — it is a conscious acknowledgment of the ubiquity of the catchphrase “the uncanny valley.” But it’s the headline of this news byte that I want to briefly talk about out: “Everything is Uncanny” and the subhead “Stop it technology, you’re creeping us out.” [Note that the website version of the article puts it differently: “Technology is Really Starting to Creep Us Out”]

Let’s start with the latter cry to tech (“Stop it…”), which is voicing something a lot of people have likely thought privately, while at the same time caging the response as cheeky or flirty or humorous. But what makes it effective, more than merely a clever cry for an end to the “creepiness,” is that the line is framed as if speaking to “technology,” as if AI, robots, computers could all, en masse, respond to the request. This is inherent to the uncanny in general: a sense of life where there is none, animation where there is the inanimate, the plastic or the dead, motion where there should be stillness (“stop it!”). This “living dead” or “conscious non-entity” conceit is not just the rhetorical “apostrophe” nor the stuff of literature and the movies or even robotics. When the market on Wall St. seems to move on its own accord, for instance, we say things like it is having a “Bull Run,” or that it is a “Bear Market” — in other words, that it is like an animal with its own conscious will, often a will that moves against human wishes and desires. Ergo, it is creepy: we are not in control of what we thought we were, and the world is no longer obedient to what we think of as “natural” law.

Thus, technology “creeps us out.” Out of what? “Out of our comfort zone,” is the general sense of it. A zone where we were ostensibly masters of our domain, prior to the uncanny experience.

Now, to the headline itself: EVERYTHING IS UNCANNY.

Note that it does not say “The Uncanny is Everywhere.” The uncanny is not a place, but rather a feeling of displacement. It is an affective response, like boredom or joy — a feeling of “creepiness” in response to a stimulus that is therefore called “uncanny.” This is precisely why “everything” (and “thing” is the perfect term) CAN be uncanny. Because anything can trigger the emotion that things are not as they should be — that familiar has been made strange (e.g. “unheimlich” — unhomelike). We can always nominalize an adjective and promote it to a higher significance than it might otherwise have, generalizing a personal feeling into a universal phenomenon.

But to creep is also move along the fringes of perception, to slowly sneak up on the paranoid mind, to quietly escalate in power and threat. Technology has become so ubiquitous that it is a part of “everything” — and has snuck up on us, escalating in a power that seems autonomous. So even if Artificial Intelligence has not taken over the world with a mind all its own in some kind of science-fictional dystopia, at the same time it is everywhere and omnipresent, as though someone other than us is responsible. Everything is uncanny.

The ad plays off the conceit of the character, who, essentially stands in for high-end appliances, imbuing the commodity with personality, voice and spirit. Ad Week calls this particular ad “a hyper-patriotic sci-fi comedy” that is rife with national pride, “set at the company’s factory in Marion, Ohio…[which] features real Maytag employees, and a giant American flag.”

But does it really “feature” the “real” employees, or subordinate them to silence beneath the mechanics of labor on the stage of a dominantly mechanized and robotic workplace?

Yes, it’s neat that the actual workers are included in this advertisement, and it’s a supportive gesture on the part of the company. But the points I raised last year about the uncanny in these renewed Maytag ads are still fully at play, especially the anxiety it sublimates regarding the replacement of man with machine, refracted through an icon of the machine as man. The old schlub of a Maytag Man — the loveable repairman who has nothing to do because his namesake products are so persistently reliable — has been replaced with the appliance itself. The commodity has become the worker who produces it. The persistent message remains that these commodities — domestic machines — are more reliable than humans when it comes to work. As I wrote last year, he “has transformed from a character we can identify with into a literalized metaphor — and something of an uncanny Other who is both like us and nothing like us at all.”

In this particular ad, the Maytag Man himself (after getting his teeth polished by a robot, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times) claims there’s “a certain standard you have to live up to” with products that are made in America. The point is that his body on the product line is manufactured at high quality. But the narrative of the ad is actually telling us a story about the male body here. It is not just a mechanical quality that he is talking about, but a fantasy of reproduction. Right after he discuss his “certain standard” of quality, the scene is followed by a funny shot where he gets the “sexy whistle” from a pair of onlooking factory workers as his newly-minted clone body is wheeled by. If you review the entire ad, you can’t help but see further subtle sexual references — in self-referential phrases like “big beautiful monuments…to dependability,” and shots like the “Spiderman love scene” moment where an up-ended Maytag clone is suspended upside-down kissing distance from a factory worker. While in the narrative proper the “body” of these male clones is substituting for the mechanical “body” of a washing machine, the machines are really secondary to the sexual/nationalistic ideologies at play in this comedy. Indeed, the uncanny humor at work in the ad depends on such issues, all within the context of the male-dominated workplace. This is what proceeds the domestic bliss of a wash room or kitchen. This is the sphere of masculinity. And there are homoerotic overtones everywhere.

The conventionally “uncanny” elements of the advertisement speak to these matters, but also divert our attention from them. It doesn’t just feature the equivalent of unheimlich “clones” in the foreground, but also relies on the production line manned by factory robots in the background. The human actors interact blindly with this world of artificial intelligence; they are secondary to nearly all of the automatic processes that are displayed, and part of the humor in the ad derives from their lack of conscious awareness of the larger consciousness at work here and the “secret” intentionality of all these machines. Perhaps it even implies that what keeps all this artificial intelligence alive are workers themselves, all the same, like clones performing redundant scripted acts of labor, just like robots, themselves. We see the cloned Maytag Men interacting socially with one another in the ad (“Good job, JB… Looking good Carl”) but the “real” workers are virtually silent and oblivious.

Aside from the “sexy whistle” moment, there is a strange fracture in the advert, when the spokesclone is interrupted by an offscreen voice that shouts “engineered” while he is delivering his pitch: “…because when you’re a washer that’s designed — ENGINEERED! — and manufactured in America…” Here we may be hearing the voice of human agency, invisible-but-assertive about the quality of the “brains” behind the design of the machine. But who has the authority on this factory floor to serve up such an assertive corrective? Who dares shout down the messaging of the ad? A floor supervisor? An elite engineer? Perhaps the camera crew? We do not know for certain, but the only other fracture to the smoothly-flowing narrative occurs in its punchline, when the screen wipes the Maytag Man/Men away to reveal the rows of identical washing machines themselves, lined up dress-right-dress. The machine is now dead matter, inorganic metal, lifelessly inanimate — neither clone nor robot…but an uncanny presence, hiding these secrets.

The vid is high on gloss and romantic fluff, spending its $10-15 million dollar budget so that the product reflects elite “class,” but it is at the same time using mass culture tropes to sell its wares. What makes it winsome is the way it is structured, presenting the advert as a narrative music video for Masha, remaking Warron Zevon’s classic rock standard, “Werewolves of London.” The cover version is good and you can currently download it free on the ThreeOlives website.

My view on this video is that it is not only “uncanny” because of the use of supernatural creatures — the werewolf is a “double” (a monstrous alter-ego) for the male lead in the ad — but also because it is presented as a remake. The first time you hear the song it might creep up on you the same way the protagonist of the video creeps on his female “victims.” You might feel it is strangely familiar (“where have I heard this before?”) until you recognize the lyrics. The structure of all remakes are inherently contingent on appeals to nostalgia, but it also relies on the structure of the uncanny — the “return of the repressed” — where past desires once considered mastered return with a potency so strong that they feel like they are acting “on their own accord” as if by magic or supernatural agency. The past “comes back to life” in a remake — a text is “resurrected.”

Advertising frequently re-injects old products and even outdated media campaigns with a renewal that is laced with supernatural references. One of the key components of my running argument about the “popular” uncanny is that media technology is often supernaturalized when it delivers its unsettling messages, often obscuring or brushing aside the “surmounted” contradictions or ideologies of the past that it displays, while privileging media’s “magic” to spellbind us. There is often (not always) pleasure mixed in with a strange unsettling feeling akin to deja vu — a sense that we have “been here before” — which often also signals that we’re still “there” and that our culture has not progressed as much as we’d like to believe.

Greg Smith, CCO at VIA, says the work is designed to take “the typical Three Olives Vodka drinker to the extreme, creating a protagonist whose polished exterior belies the beast within.”

Of course, we can’t take that notion, or the campaign’s story line, too literally. If we did, it would mean our classy canine cruiser plans to ply unsuspecting women with vodka and then tear them limb from limb. (That’s what werewolves do. Along with shedding all over the sofa.) Even seeing the wolf as a metaphor, the ads come a little close to objectifying women as prey. — David Gianastasio, AdWeek

If you don’t “see a wolf as a metaphor,” I don’t know what you think you are seeing.

But my point is that we have been here before. The pop culture references are numerous. The history of horror films is summoned in the video — films that the song “Werewolves of London” ITSELF referenced in its lyrics, here recapitulated all over again, and the video also seems to be draw from many “sexy” urban fantasy tropes that are so familiar to us now that we don’t need a narrative at all, just a song and a flash of fangs, to indicate what is happening in this video. It even reaches back the fairy tales of yore that superceded these films — playing off the girl/wolf power play that happens in Little Red Riding Hood (here framed as a Black Riding Hood, in the singer’s costume). So if the ad objectifies women as prey, it also in its conclusion suggests that women can tame the beast, or even best him, and that she is in control of him all along. This, of course, objectifies man as a sort of animal as well. But what’s being sold here is not power or gender identity so much as the release of libido via alcohol. A relinquishing of control to the commodity. This magic elixer brings out “the dark side,” the repressed desires of the unconscious, as a monstrous alter ego. The vodka is like Dr. Jekyll’s potion.

This sort of messaging is part of a long history of advertising that makes use of supernatural narrative and tropes of the uncanny to pitch a product. Lots of booze is occult in its appeal, but as horror goes mainstream, the more we get ads like these for products ranging from “Voodoo Ale” and “Magic Hat” craft beer to Crystal Skull Vodka.

On the Uncanny . . .

…animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny.